Thwarted Again

I haven’t posted here in too long. My birthday has come and gone and now I am older than I was. It’s somewhat underwhelming. What has happened since the last time I came here? I started playing WoW again. That probably has something to do with the giant lack of progress in the rest of my life. But hey, we went to Karazhan and killed a few things so bully for us. Warren and Josh came to visit in early September and I succumbed to temptation and purchased a new computer.

I’ve been slowly finishing the table. I’m currently working on the drawer pieces after which the top will need to be done. That will be challenging. I got some spray cans of the waterbased poly but I’ll have to test that out on some scrap before I commit to using it on the top. If it looks acceptable it’ll make that part a lot easier.

My sister’s wedding forges boldly ahead. I need to go get measured for my outfit this week. Of course I’m filling in for my boss at work this week and it’s disaster central so all I want to do when I leave is go home and vegetate. I also need to collect my invitation from the mailbox but I hate the mailbox so much. So much. I’ll need to buy a gift as well. I guess I’ll have to be responsible this week. Bleh.

The spring 2007 anime season is coming to a close and Gurren Lagann finished up this weekend. It was superb. I’m not a big giant-fighting-robots fan but the show was a lot of fun and the ending was acceptable if not the perfect happy ending everyone was hoping for. I’ve been taking over Aaron’s house to show episodes to my peoples and so far they seem to like it as well. We’re nearing the end of the second plot arc which is pretty good. Episode 15 in particular is excellent. It’ll probably be Sunday or next week before we get to see those though because Mr. Bill is out of town for the weekend. I really should write more about GL but I don’t have any big philosophical view point about it. They kick reason to the curb. It’s great.

Really the thing that has suffered the most is the rowing. Exercise has never been a favorite of mine so it takes a lot of will power to keep up with it and I find myself in short supply of that recently. I need to get back on it for the wedding. It would be nice to look nice for the pictures.

We also went to the Flugtag. The Flugtag was great fun. Even with the nice weather and the schedule shift to the evening it was still blastin’ hot out there and there were a ton of people. I have to say that the bulk of the entries were pretty weak. No one even managed a decent glide. The kids who won were from a local skateboard shop and they did a good job. They deserved to win so it’s good they did. Their pilot managed to ride the giant winged skateboard all the way down standing up. He kinda fell over when it hit the water but didn’t fall off and turned the falling over into a sort of cocky lounge which the crowd loved. Ms. K says that she will be disappointed if I don’t do something for next time so I guess I need to get on that. Can’t go around disappointing people. More. I think that the human body mass catapult combined with a decent glider design plus bicycle crank power for a prop has a good chance of at least long distance gliding if not actual powered flight. The rolling launch platform isn’t a bad idea either. 4 extra feet never hurt no one, ‘cept maybe the pilot.

I had a monster storm come through my neighborhood last night. When I got home the sky was dark and threatening but nothing you would think would be apocalyptic or anything so I sat down and fired up the ol’ Gamecube. Over the weekend I decided that I wanted to finally open up the gamecube port of the Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and give that a shot. I’ve been working through the first set of quests to collect the three spiritual stones which allow access to the Sacred Realm via the Cathedral of Time. It’s been pretty enjoyable. So, I’m on my way over to the Zora town to rescue someone who got eaten by a fish when all of a sudden *BOOM*. Power goes out, flickers several times and then comes back on again. TV comes back on, receiver comes back on, gamecube is dead. Completely inert. So, no more Zelda for me. I hear the Wii plays gamecube games so maybe that’ll be an excuse to pick one up.

So, at this point I decide to turn my attentions to the computer which is on a UPS. Lightning starts striking more frequently and is close enough that I can hear the EM interference coming out of the computer speakers. So I’m thinking how this is probably a bad thing when *BOOM*. Power goes out again and stays out for 20 – 30 sec. I start shutting down the computer because if it’s going to keep doing this at some point the UPS won’t be able to soak up one of these spikes and then that’ll be it for the computer. I get the computer turned off and I’m going around back to start unplugging everything from the wall and *KA-BOOM*. As best as I can tell, lightning struck the two story house across the street.

The power doesn’t go out but the fluorescent light in the kitchen is not shining even though the switch is on and the GFCI outlets in the kitchen are in safe mode with the little red light on. Bad times. A fleet of fire trucks show up to the house across the street about five minutes later but there doesn’t seem to be any actual fire fighting going on. This morning there was an ADT truck in front of the house so maybe they got hit and their security system called the fire department.

Anyway, after all the rain passes I plug the computer and whatnot back in and now the internet is broken. The DSL modem claims that it is connected to the DSL but that it is not connected to the LAN. The router says that it is connected to the LAN but not to the modem. I ended up calling tech support to confirm my suspicion that the ethernet port on the modem was dead. Off to Compusa to procure a new modem and finally at 11:00 in the evening the house was back to normal. I tell you what though, Gurren Lagann 17 was worth the wait. Superb.

!Addendum! The Gamecube powered back up the next evening when I got home from work!

It’s been a busy month. After the Rise of Honor get together (at which precious few were actually still in Rise of Honor, sigh) I started playing the blasted video game again. I managed to stay away from it for three months which is good but I’ve managed to log in and do something almost every day since I reactivated my account. Add to that various personal / family dramas and the end of the quarter at work and I have not had time to post nor really anything worth posting about. The table continues, though progress has slowed to a crawl. I am putting the finish coats on the pieces and I have to wait two hours between coats so I’m limited in the amount of work I can do at any one time. Also Summer has appeared and the garage is now powerfully uncomfortable to spend more than five minutes in before about 10:00 in the evening.

All of the above has caused me to slack off on my rowing. I decided to remedy that this week and I have rowed at least a half hour every day since Tuesday. The thing that has ultimately brought me here to make a post is that today I did a 1000 Calorie workout. I’m pleased and I’m not completely dead so that’s nice as well. It took me 1:16:03 to tick over the thousands digit on the counter and the machine claims that I traveled 16,906 imaginary meters doing it. Good for me.

I expect I will continue playing the video game. It is pretty fun after all. I’ve been doing the lvl 70 non-heroic 5-man instances with Warren, Josh, John and whoever else is interested. Keiran has reverted to a more standard Australian schedule since his return so I haven’t been on much when he’s been on and vice versa. The folks that left RoH back in March have been asking me to join their raiding guild but I really can’t afford to start that business up again. It takes a fantastic amount of time and can be very frustrating. I think I’d like to try a heroic instance this week and start getting some badges of justice for the fancy equipments available for them. So much to do without even setting foot in a raid instance. As long as I can keep up with the rowing and the table and, you know, eating and stuff I don’t see why not. It may be possible to enjoy the game and not get obsessed with it.

The Flugtag is coming up in August. I’ve actually started seeing advertisements for it on some of the websites I visit. I think I’m going to try to attend the event this time regardless of the heat. It would be fun to see people with more motivation and time than I have throw themselves in the lake. I guess that’s it for now. Perhaps I’ll post again this coming week. Let’s all hold our breath.

Haruki Murakami is the author of one of my favorite books, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The name is a little strange but judging a book by it’s title is not really any more useful than using the cover. The story takes place in two different settings, chapters alternating until the story converges at the end. One of the parts (the End of the World) is inspiration for the setting of Haibane Renmei which I believe qualifies as my favorite anime. At some point I will probably write a little about what it is that I like about Haibane Renmei but for now I’ll leave it be. The book is about a person who works as what amounts to human encryption. He reads information, processes it in his head via special training he has received and then transcribes the encrypted form. This part of the story is the Hardboiled Wonderland. There is espionage and thuggery and wanton destruction of private property and romance and a great deal of eating. The other half of the story is about a dream-like place which is the End of the World. It is in a town and local farmland and forest landscape surrounded by a high, seamless wall. The unnamed protagonist of this part of the story is separated from his shadow at the beginning of this part and is sent to “read” old memories from the bleached skulls of the local cow analogue which are stored in the library. Only he can do this because he is not yet wholly part of the town. During the course of the book connections begin to appear between the two parts of the story and eventually we come to understand how the two parts relate and what is happening to the protagonist. There is a very liminal quality to both parts of the book. The Hardboiled Wonderland part ultimately becomes the story of the last days of the main character, how they came to be his last and what he decides to do with them. The End of the World part also has a defined separation between the main character and the world he is in and a count down to when he will lose his individuality and become part of the town inside the wall. It’s pretty good. Murakami has a way with conversation that I like and he is very meticulous about the detail of his settings and the minor actions his characters take. It gives them personality beyond the things that they say.

Murakami’s After Dark was published in the U.S. this year and I picked it up last weekend and read it. It takes place in Tokyo between midnight and dawn. The thing that got me to buy it was that my friend Aaron recently went to Japan and one of the stories he brought back was of a night he spent in Tokyo. The subways stop running around midnight and don’t start up again until 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning so if you miss the last train it’s either a prohibitively expensive cab ride home or you’re out for the night. The idea appeals to me. Specifically it reminds me of one night from my freshman year in college among the many sleepless or almost sleepless nights. My roommate frequently had “guests” over which interfered with my sleep and ultimately drove me to spend as much evening time away from my room as possible. I started frequenting the Metro coffee shop on the drag and that is where I met a large number of my college friends. One weekend the roommate had two friends visit and I volunteered my bunk for one of them as I didn’t really want to be there when they all came back from their downtown escapades and I was used to being out late anyway. What’s a few more hours until the sun rises?

So the idea of willingly stranding yourself in your own town for a night resonates. The book mainly focuses on Mari Asai who is a 19 year old college student we find sitting in the second floor of a Denny’s reading a book, drinking coffee she doesn’t seem to particularly enjoy and occasionally lighting a cigarette but not really smoking much of it. A trombone bearing young man enters the restaurant notices her and sits down and the story goes from there. There are a couple of subplots about Mari’s sister Eri who has been asleep for two months and a salaryman working late who has problems mostly of his own manufacture. In all three of Murakami’s books which I have read the boundaries between the real world and other, stranger dreamworlds seem thin. His characters are either thrust into or seek out situations or places where the boundaries are at their thinnest and they end up going through. I guess a lot of the books I like have similar themes. Neil Gaiman writes books with permeable reality like Neverwhere and Stardust and his Sandman comic is basically about the soft border between the waking world and the Dream. One of the neat things in After Dark is that the normal Tokyo restaurants, streets, parks etc. seem as surreal as the strange place the sleeping Eri goes during her part of the story or the End of the World as if the night itself is a strange otherland and the last train carries the city of the day with it out to the suburban neighborhoods only to return with the dawn. It’s pretty quality and a short read though I think I’d wait for paperback though as twenty bucks is a bit steep for 180 pages.

Now I’m trying to chip away at Vineland by Thomas Pynchon and I’m having less luck than I would like. The writing style is dense and a lot of the grammar is confusing. The descriptions take on a very stream of consciousness style in places that is nigh-impenetrable and makes it hard to get into the story. I’m going to keep at it though because I suspect there’s something cool going on that I’ve only seen the tip of so far.